Check It Out for Tuesday, March 10th
David Moberg at In These Times about the neoliberal spectre haunting America, the GOP Reaganite fallacy that government is the problem.
"Obama said in his inaugural speech. “Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.”
"Obama’s pragmatic formula rejects the prevailing ideology that the smaller government, the better (except for the military and the protection of property rights). It also taps into the notion that while Americans may not like big government in theory, they want government to solve many problems. And the problems now facing Americans demand a much broader role for government.
"The issue is not just what works, but also for whom and for what ends. Obama needs to shift policymakers and the public toward seeing that government, when well run, can be a beneficial force that does more than monitor the flaws and clean up the wreckage left by the market and by big corporations.
"The majority of working- or middle-class Americans will trust government more only if it consistently works for them. And if government works for them, then the economy will work better. That’s the message of economist Jeff Madrick’s new book, The Case for Big Government (Princeton University Press, 2009).
"Despite the laissez-faire culture in the United States, government intervention — from protecting infant industries to forming public universities — has always played a central role in the country’s development. And big government has produced results, Madrick argues, such as faster growth and greater equality during the first quarter-century after World War II, particularly when compared to the stagnant standard of living for most Americans and the growing inequality and insecurity that resulted from neoliberal policies of recent decades.
"Government, Madrick argues, has advantages over private corporations. It has an ability to coordinate large systems, to take a long-term perspective, to attend to the common good, to be held accountable, to provide greater stability and to benefit everyone (positive externalities, in economist’s terms). While the limits of government are endlessly trumpeted, few note the numerous areas where big government often works best.
Dahlia Lithwick at Slate asks about the Obama administration rationale for keeping Bush skeletons in the closet.
"Having inherited an undifferentiated mass of legal "war on terror" doctrine from the Bush administration's constitutional chop shop, President Obama finds himself in the position of being Bush's Secret-Keeper. Picking its way warily through a minefield of secrecy and privacy claims, the Obama administration this week released nine formerly classified legal opinions produced in the Office of Legal Counsel (while holding back others that are being sought) and brokered a deal whereby Karl Rove and Harriet Miers will finally testify about the U.S. attorney firings (but not publicly). Meanwhile, the administration clings to its bizarre decision to hold fast to the Bush administration's all-encompassing view of the "state secrets" privilege, and the Nixonian view of executive power deployed to justify it. The Obama administration has also been quick to embrace the Bush view of secrecy in cases involving the disclosure of Bush era e-mails and has dragged its feet in various other cases seeking Bush-era records. If there is a coherent disclosure principle at work here, I have yet to discern it.
"...President Obama may also have some wrongheaded ideas about protecting Americans from knowing the truth.
"Americans beg to differ. The president has been proved wrong in his claim that there is no political will in this country for unearthing wrongdoing...close to two-thirds of the public want investigations into the Bush team's use of coercive interrogation and warrantless wiretapping. My guess is that those numbers will only go up, as America digests the OLC's newly released constitutional quilting projects. This latest batch of memos, after all, offers us the proposition that U.S. citizens wouldn't be protected by the Fourth Amendment if the military were deployed against suspected terrorists in the United States and that the president (as channeled by then-OLC lawyer John Yoo) had secretly granted himself the right to suspend free speech and a free press.
"If President Obama has some better rationale for hiding the markers along the road to torture or eavesdropping from the American people, it's time we heard it. But keeping this information from us for our own good is not an acceptable argument. The most recent OLC memos demonstrate precisely why the last eight years were so extraordinary. The suggestion that we just need to get over it is starting to sound extraordinary, too."
Jonathan Tasini at Working Life comments on a Financial Times series about the future of capitalism which could be called the failure of capitalism.
"Yes, that is the underlying message delivered today by one of the world's leading financial publications. For many of us, this is no surprise: you had to be truly ignorant to pretend like the economic system was a success just based on the growing divide between rich and poor over the past decade, and the three-decade long decline in wages in the country. Still, to see the FT pronounce the obvious is refreshing.
"The article is written by Martin Wolf, one of the FT's main economic gurus who I don't always agree with but who always writes something sophisticated. His piece kicks off a new FT series dubbed "The future of capitalism". His first paragraph:
"And this is precisely what many people have argued for many years--many people who were laughed at, ignored by the media talking heads and policymakers, and scoffed at as just people who were not willing to get with the new, great global economy. There were some voices who pointed out, amid the noise of the nonsense of the "Dow 35,000" (can we hang those people?) and the stupid nonsense about the "free market" and "free trade, that something was gravely amiss...as in, the actual vast majority of people were not having such a great time.Another ideological god has failed. The assumptions that ruled policy and politics over three decades suddenly look as outdated as revolutionary socialism.
"How many times, in the past three decades, do you remember hearing about how wonderful our economy was? The noise obscured this fact:...people were working their asses off and not getting paid. Which forced people to rely on credit cards and home equity and...well, you know where that story ended up.
"Most people I know who opposed the "new capitalism" did so because they saw the seeds of the collapse of the system because it was based on punishing workers and seeking out efficiencies based simply on finding the lowest wage possible.
"Now, as Wolf says, the world of the past is over.
"And the optimistic part: we can now rebuild an economy that values broad prosperity over greed. Let's get to it."
Tom Lasseter at McClatchy Newspapers about Russian advice on Afghanistan.
"The old diplomat sighed as he recalled his years in Afghanistan, and then leaned forward and said in a booming voice that no escalation of troops would bring lasting peace.
As the Soviet ambassador to Afghanistan from 1979 to 1986, Fikryat Tabeyev saw the numbers rise to more than 100,000 troops without any possibility of victory against a growing insurgency.
"Even with President Barack Obama's plan initially to send 17,000 more U.S. soldiers and Marines to that mountainous nation this year, the combined NATO-American force will be smaller than the Soviet contingent was. Moscow's failure to pacify Afghanistan, which broke the back of the Soviet Union, doesn't mean that the same fate awaits Obama's efforts, but ignoring a decade of experience there would be a mistake, former envoys and generals warn.
"The fundamental problem in Afghanistan is that it isn't a country in the way the West thinks of countries, said retired Lt. Gen. Ruslan Aushev, who did two tours there and left as a regimental commander.
" 'There has never been any real centralized state in Afghanistan. There is no such nation as Afghanistan,' said Aushev, who's a former president of the Russian Caucasus republic of Ingushetia and now heads a veterans group in Moscow. 'There are (ethnic groups of) Pashtuns, Uzbeks and Tajiks, and they all have different tribal policies.'
"As a result, any occupation force will spend much of its time propping up a government that has little relevance outside Kabul and trying to corral disparate ethnic groups and tribes into a national army that's often unwilling to fight, Aushev said."
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